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29/06/2010

Today marks the first anniversary of my blog,I'm quite amazed that a year has passed. I've hesitated before starting out mainly because I didn't really know how to run a blog,but it turned out OK,this blog is a way for me to forget all the stress and the madness we are living in,and it turned out to be a source of great fun .Hope that you readers enjoy visiting my blog as much as I enjoy updating it.

Sir Paul McCartney dodged a bum note last night as he rocked away the World Cup gloom in a three-hour marathon.

The Beatle hero lifted shattered spirits among 50,000 fans in London's sun-drenched Hyde Park - in a performance worthy of a national hero.
But the superstar turned down a cheeky fan's request to autograph their bottom after spotting the invitation on a placard.
Squinting into the huge crowd, he said: "We got one here that says 'Sign my butt and I'll get it tattooed'.

The answer to that is no."

And he was stunned by the sea of faces staring back as he took to the stage in Hyde Park as the sun began to set.

"I'm just going to take a second to drink this in - this is pretty cool," he told fans just two hours after the Three Lions defeat to old foes Germany.

Sir Paul, 68, played songs from throughout his career - including Beatle classics All My Loving and Long And Winding Road, and Wings hits such as Jet, Let 'Em In and My Love.

To a roaring crowd and giant pyrotechnics display of fireworks, he closed London's Hard Rock Calling festival - watched by comic David Walliams and his new bride Lara Stone.

Motown Legend Stevie Wonder - who turned 60 last month - played the festival on Saturday, performing Isn't She Lovely and Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind.

Here are rare pictures of Bailey Linda Olwyn Mccartney Willis,the 3 years old daughter of Stella and Alasdhair Willis,and Paul's only grand daugther,This little girl is such a cutie,she's a great combination between her parents,and she's a fashionista on the making as she's wearing Stella Mccartney for Gap ,Mummy must be proud.

Paul McCartney experienced the Hampden Roar first hand on Sunday as he whipped the audience into a frenzy at his first live concert in Scotland for over 20 years.

Despite starting off with a few technical glitches, the gig – part of his Up and Coming worldwide tour - got under way after support act, Scottish singer Sharleen Spiteri, warmed up the crowd for him.

The good natured performer took the problems in his stride, jokingly telling the audience: “You know what? It’s brilliant to be back here in Scotland. We’re going to start off with a technical error. We should’ve started by now but instead I’m just going to talk to you. Just pretend you’re not seeing this bit.”

Fresh from his set at the Isle of Wight Festival set, the Beatles star launched into a career-spanning mammoth set of over 30 hits, with the repertoire made up of a range of Beatles classics, as well as solo hits and songs with his band Wings.

Landing myself a few brownie points with my dad, I took him along to the concert which fell on Father’s Day, thinking that someone of his age group would probably appreciate the gig more than me.

Not so. Sir Paul might be 68, but he bounded about stage for two hours and 45 minutes without so much as a minute’s break, singing and playing a range of instruments including the piano, ukulele and various guitars, with more energy that most men half his age could manage. His enthusiasm was infectious and everyone in the crowd, young and old, were soon up on their feet, swept up in the atmosphere.

Songs included Beatles classics like Hey Jude and Yesterday, a range of Paul’s solo songs such as as Live & Let Die, and his hits with Wings, like Nineteen Hundred and Eight Five.

Tugging at the patriotic heart strings, Paul ran across the stage with a Scottish saltire flag before launching into a rousing performance of crowd pleaser Mull of Kintyre, backed by the Loretto School Pipe Band. “We couldn’t come here without doing this song,” he told the crowd.

Sir Paul also performed various moving tributes to friends and loved ones he has lost, including his late wife Linda, Beatles members John Lennon and George Harrison, and Jimmi Hendrix.

After being away for so long, all eyes in the packed crowd were on Macca to see if he could live up to his reputation, and they hype of his latest tour. And the winning combination of unforgettable hits, stunning lighting and pyrotechnic effects and fireworks all combined to make sure that this is one show that’ll be remembered long after Sir Paul leaves Scotland.

“I have a feeling you’ve had a good time tonight. You’re a brilliant crowd. Thank for the welcome back to Scotland,” Paul – who teased the audience with not one, but two encores – told his fans. And looking emotional, Macca finished off the concert by saying: “Scotland we love you and we’ll see you at the next one.”

When Linda McCartney passed away in 1998, her death was discussed on the evening television news. A young child of my acquaintance became very upset. “I loved her veggie sausages,” she cried. “Who’s going to make her sausages now?”

There was more to Linda than a vegetarian food guru, obviously. She was the inseparable partner of one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our times, his creative muse and collaborator, a member of his Seventies band Wings. Sometimes her musical credentials are called into question, although it is worth noting that she is co-credited on many of Paul McCartney’s best songs of that period. And there was one area of her creative life where her artistry cannot be doubted (aside from her sausages, of course). Linda McCartney was a fine rock photographer, which is how she met Paul in the first place.

What she had as a photographer was a casual, easy, candid style. People were obviously relaxed around her, and allowed her access to their inner worlds. This is obvious even in her pictures of the Swinging Sixties rock set before she became the wife of a Beatle. Linda’s photos aren’t mythmaking, iconic images. She doesn’t seem to look at her subjects as either a starry-eyed fan or a visionary stylist, so these are not the kind of images that add veils of illusion to our rock Gods. But that’s what makes them ultimately so fascinating, and so valuable. They tend to show the real people behind the myths. And when we are talking about such mythic characters as The Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Ray Charles, Janis Joplin and Neil Young, that is really something.

Paul McCartney plays Hyde Park this Sunday, and there is going to be an exhibition of Linda’s photographs in the Hard Rock café’s VIP area. Which, of course, is not much use to regular music fans without those special passes. But I got a sneak preview, and snaffled up these shots above and below. What I like about this picture of Lennon and McCartney at a writing session on Abbey Road, is that it really is just two guys, working together, a little uncertain and thoughtful. Who knows what they are making notes about? A lyric change on ‘Let It Be’? Mostly, this period is thought of as The Beatles divorce, when the songwriters fell out of love with each other. But here, they look like mates and colleagues, still connected by their work.

And I love this smiling shot of Jimi Hendrix, because it is so uncool. Usually when we see Hendrix, he looks beyond mortal, a rock star headed for the heavens in all his flaming glory. But here he is just a young man thinking about something that amuses him, barely aware of being photographed.

As the wife of a great songwriter, Linda is, of course, also commemorated in song. Talking about his favourite songs recently, McCartney named ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ and ‘Blackbird’, both of which pre-date meeting Linda.

But in his post Beatles catalogue, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ certainly ranks right up there with his best ever, a song of utterly dazzled and bewildered love, of which Linda was the subject. And in belated celebration of Macca’s 68th birthday last Friday, follow this link to a great remix version of ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ that he made with DJ and producer Freelance Hellraiser in 2005.

If you haven’t got tickets to Glastonbury this weekend, you could always join me singing along with a Beatle in Hyde park. Just so long as he doesn’t expect us to join in on that other Linda song, ‘Golden Earth Girl’. All together now: “Golden earth girl, female animal, as she falls asleep she’s counting fish in a sunbeam, in egg shell seas”.

It’d be easy to make 68-year-old dad-rocking former Beatle Paul McCartney sound ridiculous – he can’t resist lifting his guitar in the air at the end of every song (even when it’s actually a mandolin), he boogies on the spot, pointed fingers aloft like an embarrassing uncle and later he’s an Englishman waving a giant Saltire. But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean that it’s right. In fact, over a remarkable three hours McCartney energetically runs through some of the best pop music that the world has ever seen. A dynamo in blue shirt and white braces (they make another Saltire on his back), he’s a cruise missile of crowd-pleasing.

Even his most unfashionable hits – a giant cheesy version of ‘Mull of Kintyre’ complete with the Loretto school pipe band and (yet another) giant Saltire in the background, a stadium-sized singalong to ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ – are far more enjoyable than it’s ok to admit in polite company.

Between songs there’s plenty of love for the Scottish crowd, but also some fantastic anecdotes. Few other acts could tell the story of how they “had the good fortune” to know Jimi Hendrix. “We put out Sgt Pepper on the Friday night,” says McCartney, after a growling rendition of the riff from ‘Foxy Lady’, “on the Sunday I went to see Jimi live. He’d learned the whole thing and opened with ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. It was the greatest compliment he could’ve paid me.” Thanks to Jimi’s enthusiastic use of the whammy bar, McCartney continues, his guitar was dreadfully out of tune, so he started scanning the audience for Eric Clapton, who was desperately trying to duck out of sight. There’s a big natural guffaw as McCartney recalls Clapton’s horrified face.

That’s all before he brings out the really big guns. Starting with ‘Eleanor Rigby’, the last 19 songs (of a truly massive 37) really show the depth of back catalogue that this living legend has to draw on. Pummelled with classic after classic – ‘Something’ (played as a big-lump-in-the-throat George Harrison tribute), ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’, ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’, ‘Paperback Writer, ‘Let It Be’, ‘Hey Jude’ – you’re left wondering what he could possibly have left for an encore. A musically, and literally, explosive version of one of Bond's best themes ‘Live And Let Die’, which is surrounded by spectacular pyrotechnics, is the kind of finale lesser acts would actually die for.

Yet as McCartney returns for the encore, correctly assessing that “I get the feeling you guys want to keep rocking”, he’s well capable of giving tens of thousands of Scots exactly what they desire. Over two encores he’s still got a thrashing ‘Helter Skelter’, a heartstrings-tugging ‘Yesterday’ and a howling ‘Get Back’ up his sleeve.

Apologising for leaving – “We’ve got to go home some time. You’ve got to go home some time” – he finishes up with an apposite medley of ‘Sgt. Pepper’ (“We’d like to thank you once again”) and ‘The End’. As the (naturally blue and white) ticker tape drowns the front row, we’re left in no doubt that we’re being sent back to our beds. Although you get the feeling McCartney was right and Glasgow could’ve gone all night, not a single member of the audience, which ranges from six to 64 and well beyond, could possibly feel short changed.

18/06/2010

It's not every day a Beatle phones the ShortList office. Andrew Dickens shares an encounter with a legend.

A 63-year-old man stands at the microphone. Hair slicked back and dressed impeccably in a dark suit, he raises his hands in an effort to hush the screaming cacophony of 55,600 infatuated young Americans, many of whom are passing out with excitement. Realising he’s got more chance of eating his own head, he carries on with his introduction. He may as well mime it.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” he begins. “Honoured by their country, decorated by their Queen, loved here in America… here are The Beatles!”

The man is legendary talk show host Ed Sullivan — and this is probably the first time nobody has listened to him. As he says the last two words, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr run towards the stage in New York’s Shea Stadium, raising the noise levels to what Lennon later described as “louder than God”. Still in their early 20s, these four English lads are already the biggest band in history.

That was 15 August 1965. This is a Monday in 2010 that probably won’t go down in history, but it is the date that I wrote in my diary “Interviewing Paul McCartney” and circled it in red pen.

“Paul will call you between 12pm and 3pm,” the nice man in his office had said. Vague, but I’m sure he’s very busy. As I wait, rooted to my desk, I begin to get unusually edgy. It slowly dawns on me that I’m not about to chat to some bloke with spring-loaded thumbs who sang with Jedward on The X Factor, I’m about to chat to a Beatle; the man who wrote Yesterday and invented heavy metal with Helter Skelter, the man behind Sgt Pepper. According to a poll I’ve just done in my head, he’s one of the five most famous people on Earth. Somebody puts Hey Jude on the stereo. He wrote that. I start to fidget.
At 3.30pm the phone rings. “Hi, could I speak to Andrew Dickens please?” says a Liverpudlian drawl. “Speaking,” I say, pretending not to know who it is. “This is Paul McCartney. I think you were expecting my call,” the drawl replies. “I love your grandad’s work, by the way.” It’s a gag I’ve heard a thousand times, but never from someone with a planet named after them (true — minor planet number 4,148), so I laugh.

He’s in a jovial mood, I reckon, so I kick off with an ice-breaker. Referring to the conspiracy theories that the real Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1966 and was replaced by a doppelganger, I ask him: “Can you either confirm or deny that you are dead?” The line goes silent. It remains silent.

The office has heard the question, heard the worried “Hello? Hello?” Jaws drop everywhere. Nobody’s ever hung up on me before and this is not a good time to notch up a career first.

The phone rings again. “Sorry about that,” says that voice. “I’m driving on country roads and the reception’s bad. I can confirm that’s true, I am a doppelganger. I looked at my dental records and they don’t match.” Back in the game.

Once my heart rate levels, we begin talking about the early days. John Lennon, a man who clearly loved a religious comparison, famously once claimed The Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”. He may have been right, but this idolatry wasn’t handed to them on a plate. No Jedward were they. The Beatles earned their musical spurs by playing the dives of Hamburg’s notorious red-light district and blistering their fingers with a mighty 292 gigs at The Cavern club in Liverpool. And, despite all the Sheas and Wembleys since, it’s those times that stand out for McCartney.

"The lunchtime sessions at The Cavern were great,” he tells me with genuine enthusiasm. “It was very intimate and friendly. You’d do requests for ‘Billy and Joey in Walton Jail’ and their friends would ask us to do Shop Around because they were in jail for shoplifting. “And then there were dreadful gigs that were memorable. We played a little village near Stroud once, but not a lot of people turned up. A few unruly youths threw pennies at us, so that was kinda miserable, except at the end we decided to pick up the pennies and pocket them, which stopped that practice fairly quickly.”

EARLY DAYS

If the UK was hard work, Hamburg was an awakening. Staying in rat-infested accommodation among brothels and bars, the band — then a five-piece with Stuart Sutcliffe, Pete Best on drums and no Ringo — would do several shows a night at local clubs. They were young men in a pit of hedonism; surely they played drunk half the time? Rock’n’roll and all that.

“Only by mistake,” says McCartney. “Occasionally, you’d think you had three shows in the evening and after the third one you might party down a bit. Then you were told you’d got four. So I do remember John coming on once in his underpants with a toilet seat around his neck.” Something, I suggest, he could use on stage. “Yeah, man. Come on, let’s do it.” I’m fairly certain he won’t.

"There was plenty of wildness back then,” he continues. “You were younger and could cope with it. But we were a fairly sober lot compared to some of the guys. We were so knackered, working the amount that we did, that we mainly slept. I remember a fashion designer told me about a party she went to and John came in and he was all ‘This is great’ and stuff. Then he got on a couch and went to sleep. And I could relate to that. But we had our fun.”

Their work ethic may have led to the odd bout of party pooping, but it paid off. You reap what you sow and, having scattered seeds on the sweaty soil of the music business, in 1963 The Beatles began to harvest a crop so huge you’d think they’d invented genetic modification.

That year saw their first UK tour, their first album (Please Please Me, which went to No1), their second album (With The Beatles, which, you guessed it, also went to No1), three consecutive No1 singles, and the birth of the term ‘Beatlemania’. It was also the year Ed Sullivan witnessed the hysterical crowds at Heathrow as the band returned from Stockholm. He subsequently signed them on a three-show contract. By the end of February 1964, The Beatles had notched up their first US No 1with I Want To Hold Your Hand and completed their stint with Sullivan. Now the whole world knew Paul McCartney, something he first realised, not when he saw himself on the cover of Time magazine, but when his holiday plans were scuppered.

“We used to go to Greece on holiday. I remember going with Ringo, my then-girlfriend Jane Asher and Ringo’s wife Maureen,” he tells me, producing mental images of a Carry On Abroad-style package holiday. “We were getting famous, but not mega-famous yet. I used to hang out with the hotel band. They didn’t know who The Beatles were at all and I remember thinking, ‘This is great, because no matter how famous I get I can always go to Greece.’ Then one day, about a year later, someone said ‘You’re No 1 in Greece’ and I thought, ‘Bang goes the escape route.’ That was a light bulb going off and saying, right, now you are famously famous and it’s not going to be easy to run away. At that point I just had to make a decision: get with it or give it up, and I decided to not give it up.”

The Beatles went on to become a phenomenon; the biggest and most influential group in pop and rock history. If you’re in a band, your music has without doubt been inspired in some way by The Beatles. As has your haircut. All good things, though, must come to an end. In April 1970 McCartney released his eponymous first solo album and, days later, publicly announced he’d left The Beatles. That December, he filed a lawsuit against the other members to officially dissolve the band.

GOING SOLO

The end of The Beatles, of course, didn’t mean the end of McCartney. He formed Wings (in the words of Alan Partridge, “the band The Beatles could’ve been”) and wrote Live & Let Die, arguably the greatest Bond theme of all time. He’s written orchestral music, duetted with Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, and twice been inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. He’s also never stopped performing, something he’ll be doing again at the age of 68 this summer. Surely stadium gigging is no pastime for a pensioner. I remind him that he wrote a song about being 64 and the line “doing world tours” was not in the lyrics.

“What do you know when you’re the age I was when I wrote it?” he says, laughing. “I don’t tour as rigorously as I used to. I have periods when I can tour and it makes me actually enjoy it better and therefore makes it seem a little easier than it used to. And also when the tickets sell out in four seconds, as some of them have done, it makes me think, ‘These people want to come and see me,’ and that helps.”

They come because if you don’t know a McCartney song then you’re in a minority of about 12 and will probably be joining the other 11 in this year’s Big Brother house. He’s responsible for 24 UK No 1 singles, 32 US No 1 singles and is listed by Guinness World Records as the “most successful musician and composer in popular music history”. If you think putting a playlist together on your iPod is tough, imagine coming up with a McCartney set-list. Bracing myself for a shower of clichés about them ‘all being special’, I ask if there are any of which he’s particularly proud.

“Strangely enough, one of the ones I’m most proud of we’re not doing at the moment, Here, There And Everywhere,” he answers, without hesitation or cliché. “I like Blackbird a lot because many people who learn to play guitar, learn that. So I’m often bumping into people who are sort of saying [adopts hippy drawl] ‘Show us Blackbird, man.’”

He apologises, but says he has time for only one more question. I want to know how he’d compare 2010’s Paul McCartney to the Paul McCartney of 1965. Is he, does he think, a better musician now?

“Yeah, I think technically better,” he admits. “But there’s something about the first flush of youth, where your computer prints out amazing stuff that you’ve fed it during your teenage years. I think there was something special about that that you can’t just keep doing.”

He apologises again for having to go and I thank him. “Goodbye,” he says. “Give my best to your granddad.” I laugh, again.

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This blog is dedicate to Paul Mccartney the cute one and family.

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